Berber Loot

By H. Bedford-Jones and John Betancourt

A madcap adventure in Morocco, complete with thrills, romance, and sudden death...and a wild hunt for stolen treasure! A pulp adventure as only H. Bedford-Jones, the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Nov 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667660523

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Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt

SELECTED WORKS OF H. BEDFORD-JONES

BERBER LOOT, by H. Bedford-Jones

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2022 by Wildside Press LLC.

Originally published in The Magic Carpet Magazine, Oct. 1933.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

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INTRODUCTION,

by John Betancourt

H. Bedford-Jones was one of the most prolific authors for the pulp magazines during his now-legendary career. According to bibliographies, he wrote nearly 200 novels, 400 novelettes, more than 800 short stories, plus poetry and non-fiction. Pulp editor Harold Hersey once recalled meeting Bedford-Jones in Paris, where the author was working on two novels simultaneously, each story on its own separate typewriter. He was the self-proclaimed King of the Pulps, a title he surely deserved.

Bedford-Jones published relatively few books in his lifetime, preferring to write almost exclusively for magazines, where his work was constantly in high demand. And he didn’t need to pursue books. In those days, magazine circulations eclipsed book sales often by a factor of 10—many of the largest-circulation fiction magazines routinely sold millions of copies. In his day, he was one of the most popular writers in the world.

Because he published in ephemeral journals, however, his fame faded quickly after his death, and today he is largely forgotten. His best known works remain his fantasy and horror contributions to Weird Tales (and a few other magazines), which regularly appear in anthologies. The vast body of his fiction, however, remains buried in musty old newspapers and magazines, where a few avid pulp fans still hunt down his thrilling tales of exotic lands and people, and small presses periodically issue new editions of rare and previously-unreprinted works. (See the Selected Works page that follows for books by Bedford-Jones currently available from Wildside Press.)

* * * *

Henry Bedford-Jones was born in Nepanee, Ottowa in Canada on April 29, 1887. His family emigrated to the United States when he was a teenager, where he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Encouraged to write by his friend, writer William Wallace Cook, Bedford-Jones tried his hand at dime novels and pulp magazine stories and quickly met with success. His works appeared in dozens of different pulp magazines, but his main publisher was Blue Book magazine; he also appeared in such titles as Adventure, All-Story Weekly, Argosy, Short Stories, Top-Notch Magazine, Golden Fleece, Ace-High Magazine, People’s Story Magazine, Hutchinson’s Adventure-Story Magazine, Detective Fiction Weekly, Western Story Magazine, and many, many more.

He died on May 6, 1949 at age 62.

As for the story at hand, Berber Loot is set in the set in then (and still) exotic Morocco, and it masterfully weaves a thrilling tale of adventurers in search of lost treasure, with the mandatory elements of romance, suspense, and murderous intrigue. It was first published in The Magic Carpet Magazine, a companion to Weird Tales, in the October, 1933 issue. I have no doubt readers loved it.

Berber Loot is typical of Bedford-Jones’s adventure fiction, which forms the bulk of his oeuvre. Indeed, adventure fiction appears to have been his main interest. He claimed Alexandre Dumas was his main influence, and he even wrote a sequel to Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (called D’Artagnan) which appeared in 1928.

SELECTED WORKS OF H. BEDFORD-JONES

The Opium Ship (2005)

The Second Life of Monsieur the Devil (2005)

The House of Skulls and Other Tales from the Pulps (2006)

Blood Royal (2008)

Pirates’ Gold (2008)

Saint Michael's Gold (2008)

The Cross and the Hammer (2008)

The Breeze in the Moonlight (2008)

Arizona Argonauts (2009)

The Black Bull (2010)

A Threefold Cord (2010)

The H. Bedford-Jones Pulp Fiction MEGAPACK® (2014)

The Seal of Gengis Khan (2020)

Cactus and Rattlers (2021)

Rodomont (2021)

BERBER